This is an interesting fallacy that I see all of the time - 'go back to paper'. Let's face it - the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system.
There is a modern airline - Air France I think, that does just this. Their systems fail often, but they have a robust paper system to keep people from being stranded.
Thing is, you don't to allow people to buy new tickets in order to function. Lots of what a modern airline does can just be ignored. You need to verify tickets and boarding passes - which can be done by straining the phone network back to a central office with lots of temp workers, and you need to keep aircraft inspection/maintenance logs current, but that's still mostly paper anyhow.
You can make very complex systems work without computers if you care enough to do so. You can also make disaster recovery systems that actually work when you need them - though you do need to follow the expensive advice of professionals, so maybe some corporations are culturally incapable.
Right, a term coined by philosophers. It's a bad term, discordant with what AI researchers research. "Machine consciousness", maybe?
but plenty of people on this forum do think it will.
Every time one of these stories is posted I see 100 people rushing to prove they're smart by posting "but this isn't real AI, it's just a trick", or something along those lines, and approximately 0 people posting otherwise.
You do realize that you don't know what a Go board looks like either, right? Human consciousness is far removed from raw sensory data. You have a software abstraction that represents the board, just like AlphaGo. Sure, your derives from sensory data, but it would be trivial these days to have the AI use an actual Go board, a camera, and a robotic arm to play - those are all solved problems, not interesting ones.
Also, you want a different term than "AI" if you want to mean consciousness. The "artificial" in AI means "doing it anyway, without consciousness". At least, that's what it means to experts in the field. SF writers and philosophers abuse the technical term, but on Slashdot we should endeavor to use technical terms related to CompSci correctly.
The style of thinking that AlphaGo does won't take us there.
Who do you imagine thinks it will? Who do you imagine wants it to? Certainly not the researchers. They're doing the practical job of solving problems using computers - problems that aren't obviously solvable without consciousness, but that they're nevertheless trying to solve without consciousness.
Actually, it is not. This approach does not work with "knowledge" or "skill". It works in an automated way which involves neither. It could be printed in a book and executed purely mechanically. Or would you claim a book can be "intelligent"?
And by book you mean Chinese room, right? And you do realize that AlphaGo doesn't play by using a deep set of lookup tables, right? Much like a human player, it has a way of scoring possible play that doesn't involve canned openings or evaluating every combination N moves ahead, but instead by evaluating what play seems weak or strong.
There is no useful definition of "knowledge" or "skill" that excludes what AlphaGo does, unless you assume your own conclusions about human intelligence. There's certainly something we call "self awareness" that the AI doesn't have (thus the "A" in "AI"), but it's not related to playing Go.
Oh, sure, the way AlphaGo's neural net does pattern matching, and the way your neural net does pattern matching aren't identical. But they are functionally equivalent, in the domain of "playing Go". I think you'll find little difference in the choices human players make (in "accurate" play) and AlphaGo makes, other than AlphaGo being less bound by habit and more likely to surprise.
Without asserting the supernatural, all you can say here are "different implementations, functionally equivalent".
Especially: any exercise equipment that claims to show calories burned will vastly "overestimate" the result (flat out lie). This is pure sales material: the makers want you using their exercise equipment.
The cost of products is often based on a price point that customers are accustomed to paying. So, technology is never going to bring that price down. Instead, technology will give you more at that price point.
Does that make sense to you, or are you still off on that tangent?
If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").
That's not how this works. Science work by advancing a collection of hypotheses to explain any unexplained data point - as long as the hypothesis fits existing data, anything goes. You cull the collection once you have more data - which one predicted it successfully, which one was falsified. "Alien superstructure" fits the available data and is falsifiable, so it's on the list. For now.
Subjective "well, I don't think that one's likely" judgement calls may influence personal choices of what to pursue in the meantime, but only observations can falsify a hypothesis.
What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.
Never confuse science journalism with scientists.
Planck's law was really out there at first - Planck didn't even have an explanation for why there would be a connection to statistical distributions - no underlying model - just a "hey, the math works, so maybe". Most of the key work for quantum physics happened very quickly after that - any revolutionary change in a field takes 20ish years, but the foundational work was complete 100 years ago. It took several decades to understand and accept that the universe really was a crazy as the story that QM tells, and to tame the math needed.
If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence
The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.
Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.
Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit. Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields. Yet it was the right answer to the puzzle of blackbody radiation curves.
Ah, but that's back to my original point - these fields are actually OK at measuring things. Measures that can be repeated by different observers and get the same result. Oh, there may only be 1 or 2 significant figures, but that still puts them ahead of most of cosmology.
"Doing statistics properly" seems to be the key differentiator in those fields - they don't exactly draw the sort who are great at math, and good stats requires a surprising amount of real math.
The problem is that you're not really predicting human behavior in a deterministic sense, but a statistical one.
The Higgs Boson was not observed in a deterministic sense, but a statistical one (you know there's no "Higgs Boson detector, right?). Heck, quantum mechanics tells us that the universe we live in allows only observations that are statistical rather than deterministic, and most of its weird results are where that is made obvious.
"Soft sciences" as you call them, seem more like scientism when strict scrutiny is applied to them.
Well, I can hardly argue whether they meet the definition of some word you made up, can I? But there's nothing wrong with statistical measurement - zoom in enough and you see it's the only kind of measurement possible.
If we saw evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system
We're the only planet in our system that's the right temperature, simple as that. Most systems don't have even one such planet, but it's not all that rare.
Also, you're nothing special.
, or elsewhere in the galaxy
Our eyes aren't good enough yet. Give it time.
Also, you're nothing special.
Essentially I am saying that the Fermi paradox calls bullshit on your statement that life is easy to make.
We don't even know that aliens haven't visited the outer reaches of our own system and cluttered it with relics. We've barely looked around.
Also, you're nothing special.
Furthermore, modern science is at odds with your statement that unlikely is a bad theory. You say it is easy, but we can't even cheat and reproduce the circumstances that create it in a lab in order to reverse engineer the environmental circumstances that would allow it to happen. It appears to be quite difficult, even if you already have life on hand to study.
Well, it did take half a billion years or so. Fairly fast in geological terms, but I gather scientists are running somewhat shorter experiments.
Also, you're nothing special.
Also you say that we have found nothing special about the Earth.
Indeed.
it were merely placement, temperature, and composition that led to life spontaneous generation would still be a valid theory.
We don't know how many places on Earth life evolved spontaneously, but the Oxygen Catastrophe killed most everything so we're only looking at the descendants of the few survivors. The conditions that led to life arising no longer naturally occur.
Simply put, if we don't know how it came about, we can't estimate how likely it is to occur elsewhere.
Sure we can. It must be fairly likely, because you're nothing special.
In regards to "dissonance theory", what observations would show it was wrong?
I listed the discordant results. Dissonance theory failed to explain differences in measurement of people who held the same beliefs, but were different in another way. People who had more beliefs in a area are more likely to reject information that disagreed with their biases (that sort-of fits, but didn't fit the formal way the theory was stated). People who were more involved -- that is, it mattered more to their lives if they were wrong -- were more likely to disagree with their biases. People were more likely to reject information that went against claims they had made publicly.
The theory was "modified" in a series of step with a series of new results. (Once a theory has been around a while, it's rarely just thrown out entirely, in any field, instead it's "modified", much less damaging to careers).
Do you see the pattern? A theory that predicts human behavior is easily falsified by observing human behavior in controlled conditions. Simple as that. Making theories that don't get falsified over time is a different matter, one which the soft sciences still aren't good at.
There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory. That evidence supports many theories, of course, and that's one of them. Future data my narrow down the choice of theories.
Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.
There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?
Life happened quickly, intelligence didn't. However, Intelligence happened quickly after the Cambrian Explosion, so the path from complex multi-cellular life to intelligence seems easy. The journey from life to complex multi-cellular life seems like the hard part, to judge from history.
Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine.
That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."
Any theory that requires an unlikely series of events to explain the universe we see is a bad theory. The more unlikely, the worse the theory. The theory that life is so unlikely that we're the only place it happened is quite bad indeed.
So far we've found nothing all that special about Earth. Certain composition, certain distance from the right sort of star, that seems to be all it takes.
The unlikely transition seems to be multi-cellular life. Life on Earth started very early, evidence that it isn't that hard. Multi-cellular life to the Cambrian explosion took a while, but its seems evolution was fairly steady, trying out lots of body patterns.
From the Cambrian explosion to intelligent life was again pretty quick (in geological terms), again evidence that it wasn't that hard.
The acting was fine, but the writing/dialog was as bad as the game, to make up for it. They're really a fun watch, with reasonable action direction in most of them, and all totally cheesy. The plot doesn't really connect with the games, though - not sure why - but it's equally silly.
Yeah, Verhoeven the idiot didn't read the book, and so didn't realize it was already satire of a sort - the sort that doesn't wink at you. Which is to bad, as he screwed up the most important point of the book from a story/interest perspective: the troopers were good at what they did. The character arcs, mostly missing in the film, are a bit darker because of this.
But the script makes a lot more sense as something not based on the book.
That was what the call a "soft reboot". They acknowledge (some of) the previous canon, but then mostly ignore it. Less annoying to the hardcore fans, but still a reboot. Plus they just made the first movie over again, but with worse characters, worse plot, and worse effects, so totally a reboot in form.
I don't know what Rogue One was supposed to be - spent 2 hours waiting for the good parts. Apparently they filmed some good parts, then cut them out.
Still, maybe Disney can find someone competent for the next one. It's not a forgone conclusion.
Arial was great for low-dpi monitors back in the day. It also looked OK on a very low DPI printer. Helvetica needs the ability of the display/page to express some subtlety to come into its own.
"Sufficiency" sounds very subjective. Not my field, but a minute with Google Scholar gives me something (more behavioral psych than comm studies, but whatever)
Confirmation bias has long been observed and measured. An early theory for explaining it was "dissonance theory", that cognitive dissonance was at the root of confirmation bias. That is, that the need to preserve consistency in your beliefs explains it.
Experiments over the years began modifying the theory - that is, its predictions were false or at least inadequate in a variety of cases. It matters how involved the subject is with the topic; it matters how much the subject already knows about the topic, and so on. Alternative hypotheses were proposed, such as that self esteem, rather than cognitive dissonance, was the cause. It's obvious now that there are a variety of factors at play, and the original hypothesis could at best be one component of a correct theory.
These sorts of hypotheses are hard to arrange experiments for that give a definitive answer (but then, the same was true for the existence of the Higgs Boson), but you can gain information, accumulate data that the theory didn't adequately predict.
Measurement is where scientific fields begin. It's still science, it's just young science. The measurement associated with astrology formed the foundation for astronomy, after all.
I'm not sure what hobby horse you're riding here. Differing sciences are at differing states of what they can do. Some can just measure, some can predict in very narrow circumstances. Etc. E.g., communication studies is beyond simple measurement and making falsifiable hypotheses about human behavior, but only in narrow cases has anyone had success.
Almost everywhere are there "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements" in the soft sciences, if not very broad or interesting ones. String theory and agenda-only social science is an anomaly.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting fallacy that I see all of the time - 'go back to paper'. Let's face it - the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system.
There is a modern airline - Air France I think, that does just this. Their systems fail often, but they have a robust paper system to keep people from being stranded.
Thing is, you don't to allow people to buy new tickets in order to function. Lots of what a modern airline does can just be ignored. You need to verify tickets and boarding passes - which can be done by straining the phone network back to a central office with lots of temp workers, and you need to keep aircraft inspection/maintenance logs current, but that's still mostly paper anyhow.
You can make very complex systems work without computers if you care enough to do so. You can also make disaster recovery systems that actually work when you need them - though you do need to follow the expensive advice of professionals, so maybe some corporations are culturally incapable.
No, I want the term strong AI.
Right, a term coined by philosophers. It's a bad term, discordant with what AI researchers research. "Machine consciousness", maybe?
but plenty of people on this forum do think it will.
Every time one of these stories is posted I see 100 people rushing to prove they're smart by posting "but this isn't real AI, it's just a trick", or something along those lines, and approximately 0 people posting otherwise.
You do realize that you don't know what a Go board looks like either, right? Human consciousness is far removed from raw sensory data. You have a software abstraction that represents the board, just like AlphaGo. Sure, your derives from sensory data, but it would be trivial these days to have the AI use an actual Go board, a camera, and a robotic arm to play - those are all solved problems, not interesting ones.
Also, you want a different term than "AI" if you want to mean consciousness. The "artificial" in AI means "doing it anyway, without consciousness". At least, that's what it means to experts in the field. SF writers and philosophers abuse the technical term, but on Slashdot we should endeavor to use technical terms related to CompSci correctly.
The style of thinking that AlphaGo does won't take us there.
Who do you imagine thinks it will? Who do you imagine wants it to? Certainly not the researchers. They're doing the practical job of solving problems using computers - problems that aren't obviously solvable without consciousness, but that they're nevertheless trying to solve without consciousness.
Actually, it is not. This approach does not work with "knowledge" or "skill". It works in an automated way which involves neither. It could be printed in a book and executed purely mechanically. Or would you claim a book can be "intelligent"?
And by book you mean Chinese room, right? And you do realize that AlphaGo doesn't play by using a deep set of lookup tables, right? Much like a human player, it has a way of scoring possible play that doesn't involve canned openings or evaluating every combination N moves ahead, but instead by evaluating what play seems weak or strong.
There is no useful definition of "knowledge" or "skill" that excludes what AlphaGo does, unless you assume your own conclusions about human intelligence. There's certainly something we call "self awareness" that the AI doesn't have (thus the "A" in "AI"), but it's not related to playing Go.
Oh, sure, the way AlphaGo's neural net does pattern matching, and the way your neural net does pattern matching aren't identical. But they are functionally equivalent, in the domain of "playing Go". I think you'll find little difference in the choices human players make (in "accurate" play) and AlphaGo makes, other than AlphaGo being less bound by habit and more likely to surprise.
Without asserting the supernatural, all you can say here are "different implementations, functionally equivalent".
Especially: any exercise equipment that claims to show calories burned will vastly "overestimate" the result (flat out lie). This is pure sales material: the makers want you using their exercise equipment.
That was a very roundabout way to answer my original question:
Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?
A simple "yes" would have sufficed. You reject it because it's fun, not because of any evidence against it.
Yes, agreed. Stipulated. I concur.
The cost of products is often based on a price point that customers are accustomed to paying. So, technology is never going to bring that price down. Instead, technology will give you more at that price point.
Does that make sense to you, or are you still off on that tangent?
If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").
That's not how this works. Science work by advancing a collection of hypotheses to explain any unexplained data point - as long as the hypothesis fits existing data, anything goes. You cull the collection once you have more data - which one predicted it successfully, which one was falsified. "Alien superstructure" fits the available data and is falsifiable, so it's on the list. For now.
Subjective "well, I don't think that one's likely" judgement calls may influence personal choices of what to pursue in the meantime, but only observations can falsify a hypothesis.
What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.
Never confuse science journalism with scientists.
Planck's law was really out there at first - Planck didn't even have an explanation for why there would be a connection to statistical distributions - no underlying model - just a "hey, the math works, so maybe". Most of the key work for quantum physics happened very quickly after that - any revolutionary change in a field takes 20ish years, but the foundational work was complete 100 years ago. It took several decades to understand and accept that the universe really was a crazy as the story that QM tells, and to tame the math needed.
If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence
The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.
Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.
Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit. Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields. Yet it was the right answer to the puzzle of blackbody radiation curves.
Ah, but that's back to my original point - these fields are actually OK at measuring things. Measures that can be repeated by different observers and get the same result. Oh, there may only be 1 or 2 significant figures, but that still puts them ahead of most of cosmology.
"Doing statistics properly" seems to be the key differentiator in those fields - they don't exactly draw the sort who are great at math, and good stats requires a surprising amount of real math.
In all this time, I see you didn't actually provide a rational argument, just "Somalia".
And did you really mean to start a low UID fight, diaper baby?
The problem is that you're not really predicting human behavior in a deterministic sense, but a statistical one.
The Higgs Boson was not observed in a deterministic sense, but a statistical one (you know there's no "Higgs Boson detector, right?). Heck, quantum mechanics tells us that the universe we live in allows only observations that are statistical rather than deterministic, and most of its weird results are where that is made obvious.
"Soft sciences" as you call them, seem more like scientism when strict scrutiny is applied to them.
Well, I can hardly argue whether they meet the definition of some word you made up, can I? But there's nothing wrong with statistical measurement - zoom in enough and you see it's the only kind of measurement possible.
If we saw evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system
We're the only planet in our system that's the right temperature, simple as that. Most systems don't have even one such planet, but it's not all that rare.
Also, you're nothing special.
, or elsewhere in the galaxy
Our eyes aren't good enough yet. Give it time.
Also, you're nothing special.
Essentially I am saying that the Fermi paradox calls bullshit on your statement that life is easy to make.
We don't even know that aliens haven't visited the outer reaches of our own system and cluttered it with relics. We've barely looked around.
Also, you're nothing special.
Furthermore, modern science is at odds with your statement that unlikely is a bad theory. You say it is easy, but we can't even cheat and reproduce the circumstances that create it in a lab in order to reverse engineer the environmental circumstances that would allow it to happen. It appears to be quite difficult, even if you already have life on hand to study.
Well, it did take half a billion years or so. Fairly fast in geological terms, but I gather scientists are running somewhat shorter experiments.
Also, you're nothing special.
Also you say that we have found nothing special about the Earth.
Indeed.
it were merely placement, temperature, and composition that led to life spontaneous generation would still be a valid theory.
We don't know how many places on Earth life evolved spontaneously, but the Oxygen Catastrophe killed most everything so we're only looking at the descendants of the few survivors. The conditions that led to life arising no longer naturally occur.
Simply put, if we don't know how it came about, we can't estimate how likely it is to occur elsewhere.
Sure we can. It must be fairly likely, because you're nothing special.
In regards to "dissonance theory", what observations would show it was wrong?
I listed the discordant results. Dissonance theory failed to explain differences in measurement of people who held the same beliefs, but were different in another way. People who had more beliefs in a area are more likely to reject information that disagreed with their biases (that sort-of fits, but didn't fit the formal way the theory was stated). People who were more involved -- that is, it mattered more to their lives if they were wrong -- were more likely to disagree with their biases. People were more likely to reject information that went against claims they had made publicly.
The theory was "modified" in a series of step with a series of new results. (Once a theory has been around a while, it's rarely just thrown out entirely, in any field, instead it's "modified", much less damaging to careers).
Do you see the pattern? A theory that predicts human behavior is easily falsified by observing human behavior in controlled conditions. Simple as that. Making theories that don't get falsified over time is a different matter, one which the soft sciences still aren't good at.
There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory. That evidence supports many theories, of course, and that's one of them. Future data my narrow down the choice of theories.
Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.
There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?
Life happened quickly, intelligence didn't. However, Intelligence happened quickly after the Cambrian Explosion, so the path from complex multi-cellular life to intelligence seems easy. The journey from life to complex multi-cellular life seems like the hard part, to judge from history.
Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine.
That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."
"Fanciful" is not a legitimate objection.
Any theory that requires an unlikely series of events to explain the universe we see is a bad theory. The more unlikely, the worse the theory. The theory that life is so unlikely that we're the only place it happened is quite bad indeed.
So far we've found nothing all that special about Earth. Certain composition, certain distance from the right sort of star, that seems to be all it takes.
The unlikely transition seems to be multi-cellular life. Life on Earth started very early, evidence that it isn't that hard. Multi-cellular life to the Cambrian explosion took a while, but its seems evolution was fairly steady, trying out lots of body patterns.
From the Cambrian explosion to intelligent life was again pretty quick (in geological terms), again evidence that it wasn't that hard.
The acting was fine, but the writing/dialog was as bad as the game, to make up for it. They're really a fun watch, with reasonable action direction in most of them, and all totally cheesy. The plot doesn't really connect with the games, though - not sure why - but it's equally silly.
Yeah, Verhoeven the idiot didn't read the book, and so didn't realize it was already satire of a sort - the sort that doesn't wink at you. Which is to bad, as he screwed up the most important point of the book from a story/interest perspective: the troopers were good at what they did. The character arcs, mostly missing in the film, are a bit darker because of this.
But the script makes a lot more sense as something not based on the book.
That was what the call a "soft reboot". They acknowledge (some of) the previous canon, but then mostly ignore it. Less annoying to the hardcore fans, but still a reboot. Plus they just made the first movie over again, but with worse characters, worse plot, and worse effects, so totally a reboot in form.
I don't know what Rogue One was supposed to be - spent 2 hours waiting for the good parts. Apparently they filmed some good parts, then cut them out.
Still, maybe Disney can find someone competent for the next one. It's not a forgone conclusion.
Arial was great for low-dpi monitors back in the day. It also looked OK on a very low DPI printer. Helvetica needs the ability of the display/page to express some subtlety to come into its own.
"Sufficiency" sounds very subjective. Not my field, but a minute with Google Scholar gives me something (more behavioral psych than comm studies, but whatever)
Confirmation bias has long been observed and measured. An early theory for explaining it was "dissonance theory", that cognitive dissonance was at the root of confirmation bias. That is, that the need to preserve consistency in your beliefs explains it.
Experiments over the years began modifying the theory - that is, its predictions were false or at least inadequate in a variety of cases. It matters how involved the subject is with the topic; it matters how much the subject already knows about the topic, and so on. Alternative hypotheses were proposed, such as that self esteem, rather than cognitive dissonance, was the cause. It's obvious now that there are a variety of factors at play, and the original hypothesis could at best be one component of a correct theory.
These sorts of hypotheses are hard to arrange experiments for that give a definitive answer (but then, the same was true for the existence of the Higgs Boson), but you can gain information, accumulate data that the theory didn't adequately predict.
Measurement is where scientific fields begin. It's still science, it's just young science. The measurement associated with astrology formed the foundation for astronomy, after all.
I'm not sure what hobby horse you're riding here. Differing sciences are at differing states of what they can do. Some can just measure, some can predict in very narrow circumstances. Etc. E.g., communication studies is beyond simple measurement and making falsifiable hypotheses about human behavior, but only in narrow cases has anyone had success.
Almost everywhere are there "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements" in the soft sciences, if not very broad or interesting ones. String theory and agenda-only social science is an anomaly.